Your Meaning of Success Will Determine Your Happiness

What does success mean to you? Becoming a millionaire? Owning a yacht? Doing what you love? Having the ability to spend time with your kids? Having the perfect body? The answer to this question will be different for each person and your answer could determine your happiness. The problem is, ...What does success mean to you? Becoming a millionaire? Owning a yacht? Doing what you love? Having the ability to spend time with your kids? Having the perfect body? The answer to this question will be different for each person and your answer could determine your happiness. The problem is, not everyone knows this. Many people define success as what they have seen in the media (i.e. big homes, luxury cars, flashy accessories, etc) and view that as their own definition of success and when they don’t achieve it, they feel like a failure. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to figure out exactly what success means to you. Many times people will work hard to achieve something they thought was success only to feel empty once they achieved it. Here’s a suggestion when coming up with your definition. Focus on what will make you happy. Realize that what we really want in life isn’t anything material. What we all really want in life are feelings. If success to you means becoming a millionaire for example, you must ask yourself why you want to be a millionaire. Power? Respect? Freedom? Let’s say your answer was freedom from a job and being able to live your life on your own terms. If that’s the case, do you think it’s absolutely necessary to become a millionaire to do that? Of course not. If you can figure out a way to make enough money but not have to put much time into it, through building some passive income sources, you can achieve your goal of financial freedom without becoming a millionaire. If you didn’t realize that and instead went out and worked hard to get the million dollars, you may find that obtaining it might not give you the freedom you wanted. What if you had to work even longer hours to keep making that kind of money? Many people fall into this trap and end up being miserable just because they thought that pieces of green paper could make them happy. Realize that everything we do, we do to get a certain feeling. It could be freedom, love, connection, power, etc. Think about your goals and what you want to achieve and more importantly, why you want to achieve them. If your answer isn’t an emotionally based one, you need to dig deeper and find out the true reason. If you find that it’s anything other than what you truly want, that certain feeling, you will need to rethink your goals. So to recap, it’s important to figure out what success really means to you. We’re all in a way brainwashed through the media to see success the way they want us to see it. When you obtain success defined of other people, there’s good chance that once you achieve it, you still won’t be happy. Figure out what’s really important to YOU and go out and get it.